This a rip-roaring set of smart, catchy hip-hop pop with a swaggeringly
confident British flavour, says Neil McCormick.

“Estate war!” is the ominous opening phrase of British hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks’s second album. But before your gut clenches at the prospect of another grim depiction of inner-city conflict, This Means War launches with a rush of energy into a deadpan rap about a preteen egg fight. “It’s not just life that remains raw,” snaps Harley Alexander-Sule as he recalls cadging 50p from his mum for a box of eggs to toss at a rival gang, while his musical partner, Jordan Stephens, weighs in with a sing-song, “so let the games begin!” It’s a fresh, funny gambit, acknowledging both the childish roots of gang life and its potential consequences: “It was pleasant if you were below the age of eight/ Only God knows if it was the catalyst for something less blasé.”

It proves a bold opening to a rip-roaring set of smart, catchy hip-hop pop with a swaggeringly confident British flavour. There was a time when Brit-hop seemed hampered by parochialism, unable to compete with the life-and-death stakes of American gangsta rappers. Yet the best of our 21st-century home-grown talent have turned that around, both musically (plugging into British dance trends rather than slavishly following US formats) and lyrically, by addressing everyday realities with a brand of humour that, crucially, respects the seriousness of the issues addressed (at least to the people facing them) by not (pardon the pun) over-egging them. Dizzee Rascal, Tinie Tempah and Plan B all mine this vein in distinctive ways. Having already notched up a million single sales, Rizzle Kicks push it somewhere potentially even more universally appealing, connecting to the music hall chirpiness and socially observant lyricism of classic, kitchen-sink British pop from the Kinks to Blur, with a hefty debt to the two-tone ska of Madness and the Specials.

The “Roaring 20s” of the album title references the exuberance of youth (the duo are both 21) while making connections between the libertarian spirit of the Twenties and the modern era. It is, at heart, a party record, in which chunky beats are peppered with perky, vintage horns and splashes of jazz and reggae keyboard sounds, the pair’s punchy rap style built around flowing, singalong melodies.

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The music itself has an uplifting exuberance that makes Rizzle Kicks’s jokes the icing on the cake, rather than the central focus. But the jokes are good (lawyers were consulted over one-liners about John Terry and Jeremy Kyle in Lost Generation) and there is a heartening attitude to the opposite sex, who are constantly praised rather than insulted. Graduates of the Brit school in Croydon, Rizzle Kicks are evidently clever, well-mannered fellows. Refreshingly, they don’t pretend to be anything else.